Heralded for its durability and practicality, tile is a workhorse surface in most American homes. But lately tile has moved from hard-working bit player to glamorous featured performer. Tile in 2011 is an expressive, fashion-forward and adventurous medium with the power to utterly transform a home. And with the growing trend of metro Atlanta homeowners searching out details that will distinguish their home from their neighbors’, many are choosing unusual applications of tile for a distinctive edge. » Continued on the next page
Even the most traditional home can benefit from a unique spin on the classics, said interior designer and Design Atelier Inc. principal Melanie Millner.
“I like to design things that are classic and timeless so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every 10 years,” Millner said. But she also cautioned, “Nobody wants to walk into a space and see something that their friends have, that they have. They want something that is unique to their own style. People are so sick of white kitchens with white marble and subway tile. It’s so pretty and classic, but there are ways you can mix that up to make it look more unique and different.
“If you like the white subway tile look, maybe you choose a different type of white tile that gives you the same feeling but is more unique,” Millner said.
Susan Cronin, a sales consultant at Ann Sacks Tile and Stone Atlanta echoed the idea of revamping the classics with fresh, more on-trend details like texture. “We’re now doing those with raised edges or recessed edges or some grooving on them rather than just the plain, straight subway tile,” said Cronin.
Kitchen designer Shirley McFarlane also craved a break from the usual all-white bathroom in her Brookhaven home and used limestone-hued tile to get the desired look. “I wanted a real warm, contemporary feel to the bathroom but with a traditional twist,” McFarlane said. She created “a very spalike feel” by using an easy-to-clean cream color, rectangular porcelain wall tile from Specialty Tile Products Inc. in Norcross on the walls and a marble pinwheel pattern on the floor. She loves the result. “It’s a very serene sort of feeling in the room,” she said.
We asked Atlanta tile impresarios to name the new tile trends that have already made their way into homes or will soon be a part of cutting-edge home decor. From traditional to transitional to contemporary, there is a tile trend suitable for every style of home, the experts said.
Glass
Increasingly prevalent in Atlanta homes, nothing beats the luster and depth of glass tile for adding light and brilliance to a space. Tile experts are seeing a definite uptick in its use in residential settings, from back splashes to bars to entire bathrooms for a spa-style ambiance. “Some cool things are being done like pouring glass over porcelain or mixing glass mosaics with Swarovski crystals,” said Jonathan Embrose, head creative at Specialty Tile Products Inc.
Bold color
Few things make a statement like a jolt of blue, green, coral, purple or red to add impact to a room. “We’re coming away from just white and off-white,” Cronin said. Embrose sees brights as symbolic in 2011, reflecting our optimism about economic recovery, and he said they can work wonders when blended with a more traditional color scheme. “Bold and bright hues mix with the neutrals we know and love, creating powerful accents or focal points without overpowering the overall design of a room,” he said.
Texture and 3-D tiles
Homeowners no longer interested in perfection are increasingly drawn to character, said designer Millner. And textured tiles deliver the depth, visual interest and varied surfaces they crave. “The new trend in texture is dimensionality, where large carved tiles are used as a focal point. Whether hand carved in ceramic or natural stone, or pressed into porcelain, a sculptured wall inspires drama and originality,” Embrose said.
Tile as art
“I guess in a lot of ways it’s replacing wallpaper and faux finishing,” Cronin said of the trend in Atlanta homes for floor-to-ceiling accent walls covered in dramatic arrangements of abstract and representational tile. Cronin also sees more and more Atlanta homeowners using artful tile design for impact in entries and foyers. One tile company, Betona (www.betona.com), can even take a favorite family photo or a beloved work of art and transfer it to tile in an example of personalized tile design. “Doing mosaics on the wall as a feature instead of artwork in a powder room I think is beautiful,” Miller said. “You apply those mosaics on a vertical surface and it becomes something completely different than if it were on a floor.”
Monumental tiles
Like so much in the world, tile also is being supersized. Homeowners can now find tile in epic dimensions as large as 4 feet tall, Embrose said. Cronin concedes that although such large-scale tiles are increasingly popular in other areas of the country, they haven’t quite taken off yet in Atlanta’s more transitional market.
New materials
Think you’ve seen it all in tile? Gold and silver leaf, leather, mirrored, metal and even tiles incorporating animal hair are bringing greater dimension and depth to area homes. Millner has done walls in an Atlanta home office in leather tiles. Leather also can do wonders acoustically, in soundproofing a room. Millner also has interspersed metal with glass or ceramic tiles to add visual complexity and to integrate old and new. “I have used it as a tiny medallion in between other tiles, maybe in a wet bar area,” she said.
Wood
An array of tile manufacturers are using carved wood tiles like Ann Sacks Tile and Stone’s Indah Collection of Indonesian hand-carved teak as a highly individual, character-infused material. But for areas like bathrooms where wood floors might be impractical, tile can be an imaginative faux-option. Many of the new faux bois porcelain and ceramic tiles feature such accurate and detailed wood grain it is almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
“We’ve put the hardwood floor look in bathrooms,” Millner said. “That has some longevity because it has the classic look of a hardwood floor, but it’s not.”
Designer tiles
Fashion and industrial designers like Vivienne Westwood, Vicente Wolf, Karim Rashid and White House decorator Michael S. Smith are all getting into the tile game, said Specialty Tile’s Embrose.
“Tile manufacturers have always consulted designers for color palettes, but now world-class designers are being hired to develop innovative new products with hands-on ownership of the creative process,” he said.
